Emergency alert systems (EAS) are used to communicate vital information to the public during emergency situations. This information is generally conveyed to the public via televisions or public addressing systems. The EAS in the United States is composed of analog radio broadcast stations including AM, FM, and Low-power FM (LPFM) stations; digital audio broadcasting (DAB) stations, including digital AM, FM, and Low-power FM stations; analog television broadcast stations including Class A television (CA) and Low-power TV (LPTV) stations; digital television (DTV) broadcast stations, including digital CA and digital LPTV stations; analog cable systems; digital cable systems which are the portion of a cable system that delivers channels in digital format to subscribers at the input of a Unidirectional Digital Cable Product or other navigation device; wireline video systems; wireless cable systems which may consist of Broadband Radio Service (BRS), or Educational Broadband Service (EBS) stations; DBS services, including certain Ku-band Fixed-Satellite Service Direct to Home providers; SDARS; participating broadcast networks, cable networks and program suppliers; and other entities and industries operating on an organized basis during emergencies at the National, State and local levels. These entities are referred to collectively as the Emergency Alert System (the EAS). At a minimum, the participants making up the EAS must use a common EAS protocol to send and receive emergency alerts.
The common EAS protocol includes plans to use the EAS header codes and messages that will be transmitted by key EAS sources (NP, LP, SP, and SR). State and local plans contain unique methods of EAS message distribution such as the use of the Radio Broadcast Data System (RBDS). The EAS uses a four part message for an emergency activation of the EAS. The four parts are: Preamble and EAS Header Codes; audio Attention Signal; message; and, Preamble and EAS End Of Message (EOM) Codes. The message may be audio, video, or text. Characters are ASCII seven bit characters as defined in ANSI X3.4-1977 ending with an eighth null bit (either 0 or 1) to constitute a full eight-bit byte.
Enhancements to the Emergency Alert System have been proposed. Specifically, the Commercial Mobile Service Alert Initiative has been created to allow wireless cellular carriers to transmit emergency alert messages to cell phones and other devices having text message capabilities; see (www.fcc.gov/pshs/cmsaac/docs/pdf/Charter.pdf). Yet these proposals fail to provide an accurate method of determining whether intended recipients of an EAS alert have successfully received the alert.
As can be appreciated from the discussion above, conventional emergency alert systems may generally have sent notification messages to recipients over a relatively wide geographic area to alert the recipients of an emergency situation, but generally do not provide feedback to the system transmitting the alerts that indicates a successful reception of the alerts by a wireless device.
Therefore a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art as discussed above.